Life Signs
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: Her heart beats slowly, arteries and capillaries and veins filling and receding like tides. Clementine is twenty-one years old today, and she is alive.


Clementine lies on her back in the tall grass and watches the stars.

Her tattered shirt is scratchy and uncomfortable with dried sweat, but it's the good one she never wears in town, the one that's never been smeared with gore, so she doesn't really mind. Besides, this time the sweat isn't from fear or terror or horror; it's from good, honest work, from turning the soil with a shovel under the hot summer sun. Her muscles ache, warm and pulsing and alive. She threads her fingers into the loose dirt at her side and smiles.

* * *

When she was twelve, she cried when she realized she couldn't remember her first-grade teacher's name. Omid and Christa found her halfway up a tree, sobbing so hard she was probably pricking the ears of every walker for miles around, and coaxed her down with the promise of warm game stew.

Sitting around the fire that night, Christa rubbed her back and said that not remembering was maybe a blessing, and Omid said he didn't even remember what he had for breakfast most days, and Christa laughed and said that was maybe a blessing too.

"It's been three whole years," Christa said, "three years, honey, it's okay. Things are different. Maybe we'd all do better not to remember," she said, and in her eyes Clem saw the same sadness as when they'd sat her down and told her she wasn't going to have a little brother or sister after all. And then Omid leaned in with his big guileless smile that didn't quite reach his eyes and said, "You're the first, Clem, you know that? You can move on from this. The rest of us, we're all stuck in our ways."

"You can be a new kind of human," they said. "You can be alive."

And that was okay, sort of, until three more years passed and she fingered her old ball cap and realized she couldn't remember Lee's smile.

At that point, she'd started going into the city on a regular basis, because there weren't all that many ways to be angry and rebellious when you were fifteen and had no friends and your adoptive parents were totally awesome zombie hunters. They'd made an attempt to move further into the countryside, early on, but with Lee's discovery about the zombies' reliance on scent to spot the living, it didn't make sense to give up a massive pool of possible resources by moving too far away, so they stayed and tried not to think too hard about what it meant, that they'd stopped running.

So the dead still wandered Savannah – they'd never really disintegrated beyond the initial creepy-dead-person vibe – but they weren't particularly scary anymore. She took down the first one she saw, smeared its gore on her old shirt for camouflage, and sometimes rang the church bells if things got a bit too crowded.

The dead were just animals, stumbling dogs half-blind with hunger and pain. There was no malice there, no dissembling, just pure survival, and that kind of made sense to Clem, so she supposed there was a certain inherent kinship. They'd killed Lee, killed her parents, but it didn't make sense to stay mad at them.

So she wandered wherever her feet dragged her, shouldering through the ebb and flow of the last remains of humanity, and sometimes she wondered if it was the same everywhere or if Georgia had just been blocked off by the rest of the world, quarantined. It was a vague, disinterested sort of thought, because either way the world ended just a little ways beyond the city limits. No point in running. There came a moment when you had to make a go of it wherever you happened to be. Maybe she was lucky for figuring that out.

Today her feet took her past the old library (_where she sat for hours with her back to the shelves, holding books at arm's length to keep the blood and guts off the pages, because Alice and Mr. Darcy and Gatsby were people who deserved to stay pristine and untouched_) and she stumbled, half-unwilling, down toward the unspoken taboo of the Marsh House.

Five seconds later, she was standing in front of her mom and dad.

Oh, it wasn't them, she knew that, she wasn't stupid. She wasn't a kid anymore. But she still wanted to grab her mom's decaying hand and play with her beautiful rings, twirling them over each knuckle until the tickling made her mom burst into a grin. She still wanted to latch onto her dad's half-detached leg and giggle and screech when he transformed his gait so he walked like a t-rex, flailing at her with too-short arms in an attempt to pull her away.

But she couldn't do those things, so she stood back, folded her arms, and watched them, and said things like, "I'm doing okay, you know, I bet you wanted me to go to college or something but that's not what people do anymore because pretty much everyone's dead, but I'm actually doing okay." The bubbling fear and grief in her chest were gone, and something harder had replaced them, a sheer varnish, protective like the gore stinking up her clothes. She liked it, or liked what it represented.

She waved goodbye to the things that weren't her parents, then loped around the corner, heart pounding as she saw the storefront. This she remembered all too well.

It was easy enough to get inside through the back, and then she was sitting on a fallen pillar, staring at a body still handcuffed to a radiator. It was mostly just bones, had never made whatever transformation kept the walkers from decaying altogether, although there were bits of flesh attached here and there, and the disintegrating clothes still provided a modicum of modesty to the wide-open chest cavity. One arm stopped just before the elbow, sliced clean. There was a hole in the skull, a starburst pattern of fractures expanding around it. Her hand clenched, once, in unconscious memory.

Ignoring the stench rising from her own clothes, she drew her knees up and rested her chin on them, staring at the skull's jaw, wrestling the memory of a faint, tired smile from that exposed structure, like trying to imagine what a half-finished building was going to be based on the bare girders alone. But she didn't say anything, and after a while she got up and walked back out to their camp, reached it just as the sun was setting.

Christa was standing there, alone, her eyes wide and haunted, and she said, "I'm sorry, baby, but that ache in Omid's leg must've been worse than we thought, must've been a clot, he took a bad turn, I'm so sorry," and Clem nodded and asked, "Do you need me to do it?," and Christa said no and walked away and eventually a gunshot echoed, and Clem hugged Christa as she sobbed and thought, _This isn't so bad, it's really not so bad, it's all just death, and I know what death is. I'm doing okay._

The trick, she realized, was not to want things.

That was what got you into trouble, the wanting. You stood beside Christa and she half-hugged you and said, "You're eighteen years old today, you're growing up so fast, I wanted so much more for you, Lee wanted, Omid wanted." And you said, calm and slowly realizing, that nobody ever asked what _you_ wanted.

And the trick was not to want things.

By the time Clem was twenty, it had been two full years since anyone living had passed through Savannah. They'd shared their camp for a few nights with a couple traveling with their son, and their news hadn't been good: they'd been walking the coastline for years and hadn't met a single living soul in months, hadn't found any signs of hope beyond their own survival. Their theory was that if they could get far enough north, maybe the zombies wouldn't be able to survive the winters. Clem didn't point out that winters that cold would be pretty hard for them to survive, too.

Their son was a cold, haughty kid a year or two older than her, and Clem had spent her nights enjoying very vivid imaginings of all the places she could touch him to make him melt, all the words she'd read in books, all the motions her body knew instinctively. When the family announced they had to move on, offered to take them along, it was tough to look at Christa and say, "No, we're staying," but Christa was too tired these days to keep moving, and Clem didn't want to leave her. So they'd gone their separate ways, and she and Christa were alone again, and the wanting was almost too much to bear. Almost.

But life was okay. She was okay. She breathed and worked the fields and sat on Omid's grave and told him funny stories, the kind he'd appreciate, and she read to Christa when Christa got sick, made her dinner, tried to pretend she didn't notice all the little ways that Christa was preparing her for the days to come. The days alone, but she was used to that, almost, she could spend her days reading and walking with the dead, and maybe someday she'd leave, but for now, for now she was okay. She was breathing.

"Thing is," Christa said, her voice wheezing and weak, "I guess we all kind of go through life hoping we'll figure out why we're here, what we're meant to do. You helped me with that, sweet pea. Helping you was enough for me. But I don't know what's left for you."

Clem took her hand – the other had a pistol in it – and looked out over the rolling hills, to the shadowy gleam of the city beyond, and she thought, _Nothing. Anything. Everything._

She smiled at Christa as the light left her eyes, made the shot quick and accurate, right through the skull and into the brain, pictured the starburst pattern, the fractures ever-expanding deep beneath the surface.

She stared at the sky, gauging, and decided there was time enough to dig a grave before nightfall.

* * *

Now she lies at the intersection of two graves, one old and hard-packed, one fresh and well-turned, and listens to her aching muscles sing as the night reels slow above her head, the warm summer breezes murmuring in her eyes and ears and nose, in her close-cropped hair.

Clementine is twenty-one years old, and tonight the slow pulse of her blood is still warm, and tonight the echo of each breath is still strong and expectant, and tonight her skin still prickles against the grass, growing goosebumps. She stares up at the stars, and she's alive. Tonight, she's alive.


End file.
